Since Monday, the newly elected George Santos has been at the heart of a vast political controversy in the United States. The Republican would have lied about his entire biography, going so far as to invent grandparents who fled Nazism during the Second World War. A potential tissue of lies which, however, could not prevent him from sitting in Congress.
Who is he ? Where is he from ? What is he doing ? Questions have been piling up about George Santos for decades. shocking revelations from the New York Times on the profile of this newly elected Republican in the House of Representatives.
At present, the only certainties are that at 34, “this son of Brazilian immigrants won in November 2022 [lors des élections de mi-mandat, NDLR] a district in New York taken for granted by the Democrats”, notes the Vox news site. A victory that also allows George Santos to become the first openly gay conservative to join Congress without having previously held an elected position.
A 100% bogus CV?
But for the rest, George Santos would be a clean sheet. In fact, “he built his candidacy on the idea that he embodied the quintessence of the American dream”, when in fact he would have invented everything, says the New York Times.
The story he sold to New York voters is that of a young man who would have managed to extract himself from a disadvantaged background – poor family, school curriculum in the public [ce qui est considéré comme un handicap aux États-Unis, NDLR] – to become an accomplished financier rich with millions.
The biography he wrote for his campaign website – now only accessible on Web-archive.org – mentioned jobs with Wall Street giants such as Goldman Sachs or Citigroup.
George Santos also claims to have become “one of the youngest vice-presidents in the sector [financier]”. A success story that would have allowed him to become rich and devote part of his fortune to various charities such as supporting children with epidermolysis bullosa – a very rare dermatological disorder – and animal welfare through his NGO Friends for Pet.
This Republican would thus be the ideal son-in-law of an America that still wants to believe in its “dream” of self-made-man. Except that the New York Times contacted Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, both of which denied knowledge of an ex-employee named George Santos.
The public university Baruch College, which would have awarded his degree to George Santos, has also found no trace of a former student with such a surname. There is also an inconsistency in the dates. George Santos claims to have obtained a finance degree in 2010 while the New York Times assures that at that time he was in Brazil where he had trouble with the justice system for a dark history of check fraud.
But the newly elected Republican is not only suspected of having invented his professional CV from scratch. The animal welfare association he claims to have led has never been registered as a non-profit organization, contrary to what George Santos claimed.
But Friends for Pet would have existed, notes the New York Times. The daily found traces of a fundraiser that this association organized for a project to help abandoned animals… but the beneficiary of this action – who preferred to remain anonymous – assured the New York Times. never seen the color of the money collected by Friends for Pet.
Since these revelations, George Santos has remained silent. Only his lawyer spoke to assure that it “is not surprising that [son client] have enemies in the New York Times who try to smear his good name with defamatory allegations”.
A financial mystery
Except that the New York Times is no longer the only one to support that George Santos is a “serial liar”. Other media discovered that he also lied about his family history. Officially, his mother was born in Brazil to Jewish parents who fled persecution in Ukraine to settle in Belgium before joining South America during the Second World War.
This family epic allowed George Santos to present himself as a “Latino Jew”, a politically significant label in a city as cosmopolitan as New York.
However, there is no trace attesting to this exodus, says The Forward, an American Jewish newspaper that has been fishing for genealogical information from Brazilian authorities. A new story confirmed by CNN, which specifies that the grandparents of George Santos were born in Brazil before the Second World War.
Finally, there is the mystery of his finances. George Santos has been on a roll in recent months, saying his last job – running the financial advisory firm Devolder Organization – helped him become a multi-millionaire, reports the North Shore Leader, a local newspaper in Long Island, New York.
He has also lent more than $700,000 to his campaign team and claims to own several buildings worth more than ten million dollars. Again, there is no record of any houses he owned, and as of 2020 he was still a tenant in a small apartment. His company does not declare, moreover, any customer and no one knows where the money comes from which it then transfers to its CEO.
The support of the Republicans despite everything?
“Congress has already had its share of scandals, but with George Santos, it’s a totally unprecedented affair that is shaking this institution,” says Vox. How could this Republican believe he could get away with such a sum of fabrications? “Part of the ‘genius’ of George Santos is that these ‘lies’ are often about fairly mundane things. For example, who would invent a degree from Baruch College rather than Harvard? Director of the Center on American Policy at University College London.
He was also able to feel reinforced in his approach by the general political context in the United States. After Donald Trump’s excesses at the White House, “we no longer know very well what is an unacceptable scandal in the United States,” said Richard Johnson, a specialist in American politics at Queen Mary University of London.
It may seem equally astonishing that such crude lies could have escaped his hapless opponent in the November 2022 election. the party did not validate another candidate until very late, which meant that it did not have much time to do in-depth research on its rival,” notes Richard Johnson.
These lies could land him in legal trouble. False statements, including financial, during the campaign are likely to earn him a heavy fine, and up to five years in prison. But “it is very difficult to prove the intentions of harm in this kind of business”, notes the New York Times.
The icing on the cake, despite the avalanche of revelations, “the Republican Party could support him for as long as possible,” said Jon Herbert, a political scientist at Keele University. As such, the George Santos case is “a perfect example of the intensification in the United States of ‘negative political bias’, the concept whereby a party agrees to defend positions that might appear unacceptable because it prevents the opposition to win points,” says Richard Johnson.
George Santos has, in fact, won a district far from being acquired by the Republicans. If the latter no longer want him in Congress, a new vote will take place “and there is a good chance that the Republican Party will lose a seat when the balance of power is already very tense”, summarizes Jon Herbert.
For now, George Santos can also count on the very opportunistic support of Kevin McCarthy, who is seeking the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives. He is, in fact, the leader of a group of Republicans very divided as to his nomination for the head of the House of Representatives, note the experts interviewed by France 24. George Santos had the very good idea to announce his support to the candidacy of Kevin McCarthy… the day the New York Times published its revelations about the very fictionalized biography of the “serial liar”.